ABSTRACT
The aim of any “final solution,” which is always first to isolate what does not fit into the privileged image of the self and then to eradicate any trace of it, will always be impossible to achieve. Because the solution’s problem, construed as the “Jewish problem” or otherwise, is fictional from the start. Because the problem of the other is the problem of the self. Because the anomalous, the strange, the foreign, the savage – whether projected onto the unfamiliar wilderness of the book of Esther, or onto the dark continent of the other woman, or onto the perverse strangeness of the other Jew – is always within as well as beyond the self who struggles to eradicate it. Self intertwines with stranger and stranger intertwines with self. The intertwining is irreducible, within Esther, within Haman, within Luther, within me, within you, within us. Total integration into a homogeneous whole is impossible. So is total segregation. Otherness can never be absorbed or eradicated entirely.
